But when a week or more passed and he did
not come anxiety deepened; and his son and the neighbors bestirred
themselves to make wider inquiries. Tardily, at last, a considerable
party searched the woods and the lake shores; and finally as many as
fifty persons turned out and spent a day and a night looking for him.
"They will not find him," the old Squire remarked with a kind of sad
certainty; and he did not join the searchers himself or encourage us
boys to do so. I think that both he and grandmother Ruth partly feared
that, as the old lady quaintly expressed it, "Jonathan had been left to
take his own life," in a fit of despondency.
The disappearance was so mysterious, indeed, and some people thought so
suspicious, that the town authorities took it up. The selectmen came to
the Edwards farm and made careful inquiries into all the circumstances
in order to make sure there had been nothing like wrongdoing. There was
not, however, the least circumstance to indicate anything of that kind.
Grandfather Jonathan had walked away no one knew where; Jotham and his
wife knew no more than their neighbors. They did not know what to think.
Perhaps they feared they had not treated their father well.
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